


I'm alone, him and me

by Skepticamoeba



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Pining, cabin in the woods, everything is cold and a bit bright and a bit wondrous, it's winter, regency au, they're very soft and hermann is a bit of a repressed worrywart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 05:56:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19203271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skepticamoeba/pseuds/Skepticamoeba
Summary: "If he moved through light, now, he could meet Newton in the snow. The snow could dampen the hems of his slacks, and he could mumble some unintelligible thing to Newton, and Newton would look at him and understand."[Newton's hours late to meet up with Hermann, and Hermann begins to worry]





	I'm alone, him and me

 

> _“The everlasting universe of things_
> 
> _Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,_
> 
> _Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—_
> 
> _Now lending splendour”_
> 
> -Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
> 
>  

Winter stays Hermann’s hand, fingers lax ‘round the pen. The sky has darkened, not quite the pitch of tar—yet opaque, yet translucent with a kind of luminescence belonging solely to the hours just prior to the utter blackening. The day has become etherized, rolling slowly to a close like a tenuous breath—like the fog coming in high, ghosting the tops of the evergreens and hovering around the torso of the rising mountains surrounding the cabin. He can see them, the sky, the trees, just outside the closed window. The snowy peaks of the mountains, the great sublime out there, and in the cabin as well.

In the cabin, it is not so great, not so awful. There is not space for such terrible beauty. The cabin is close, and small, and intimate. The fire’s been lit for hours, and it’s condensing on the windows, on Hermann. It sticks his shirt to his back like a second skin, like a tertiary consciousness. The consciousness that his consciousness is focused on another being. He is looking at the mountain, but in the periphery he is watching the numbers. He is thinking that it’s become late, and that such a thing is worrisome. He bites his lip, flinches when the gale hits against the glass windows until they rattle. He is sweating. Out there, he would not be. Out there, the snow is not meek and small as it had been the last couple of days. It is heavy and coming down fast. Soon, it’ll leave a high spread to wade through. Soon, it will cause limbs to become bogged down and leaden.

The flame of the lantern flickers.

 

* * *

 

Newton says he shouldn’t use a candle anymore when they have electric. Hermann likes the wavering of the flame, and he likes the smell of it, and he likes the way wax hardens. He likes that wax can change from solid to liquid and back again. It is capable of a temporary transmutation—the likes of which he envies. For many reasons, he wishes he was sometimes not who he is. It is not a rupture he desires. He doesn’t want to become unrecognizable to himself, but sometimes he would like to be _other_. He would like to be _different_. Perhaps, then, the treacherous altitudes of his mindscape would not be so unsurmountable.

He sets down the pen, pushes back from the desk and stands. He walks to the other window, next to the door: the one that looks out on the narrow porch. The wood is dark, wet, and the night has not stopped rolling in. He wrings his taxed hands; leans heavily on his cane. It’s costly, this time of year, to do much with himself. He aches, and sometimes is very inflamed. His mother tells him it’s a naughty sprite that held it against Hermann when it did not find a shallow bowl of milk set out for it. She says his hands are precious, and the sprite knew. Hermann has named the sprite Work. And Work is a very spiteful being.

Though he aches, work cannot keep his mind off of the man who should be at the cabin, basking in the last of the dusky evening. As if a summoning, Hermann fancies he sees, amongst the woods, the bobbing of a light steadily getting closer. He manages to keep his composure as long as it takes Newton to be just a few bounds from the steps that lead up to the porch. Then, he throws open the heavy door, the light from inside the cabin pouring forth a path on the wood deck and over the unbroken snow. His shadow stretches long, falling over Newton’s face. Hermann shifts, and Newton appears. His face is no longer ducked into his winding scarf of ridiculous proportion, rather, he has turned it upwards. He is breathing harshly: puffs of air from a pink mouth, lips whetted.

Of a sudden, Hermann cannot bear to say the chastising things he’s been thinking since the passing of two hours beyond Newton’s supposed arrival time. Of a sudden, he is bereft of anything that is not this simple feeling. He wants to call Newton daft, and curse him well until he is shame-faced. He does not. Instead, he allows this _thing_ that has infiltrated his mind to take its fill of the sight before it.

Newton’s face has softened from open-mouthed surprise to a soft and enigmatic smile. He’s begun to walk again, high boots parting snow and creating deep ravines into which light spills. His cheeks are ruddy from the snow, and his hands are safely tucked into his coat pockets.

In regards to Newton, Hermann thinks there is always something enigmatic. Newton says things, but at the same time doesn’t say anything at all. He goes mum when most Hermann wishes he wouldn’t. He likes to think he knows Newton fairly well—and he does—but it is complicated. They are _both_ complicated.

There are times where the universe folds in on itself. Hermann doesn’t know how to describe it, but he feels it tugging at his diaphragm so succinctly that he knows it would be too elusive to put word to. At these moments, Hermann often thinks of moving through light. Pushing through it as if it were made of something material, as if it had form and volume. He’s thought of moving through it, meeting in it with something or _someone_. It would be a combinatoric explosion, variables blasted far from the source site and then stitched together twice as quick. He and the someone would be trapped in the light: no words, or mental verbiage. Just two perceptions meeting and feeling at each other as if with neon electric antennae. Proverbially knowing each other through sense alone.

If he moved through light, now, he could meet Newton in the snow. The snow could dampen the hems of his slacks, and he could mumble some unintelligible thing to Newton, and Newton would look at him and understand.

Hermann remains still in the light and watches Newton move through the dark, filling up the pathway with his inelegant form; asymmetric, ungainly. Newton comes to _him_ , face turned up, in shadow. In Hermann’s shadow. They pause wordlessly until, at last, Hermann turns, allows Newton to shuffle past him inside the cabin. Hermann closes the door behind him and presses his back to it as if to make sure Newton won’t leave again. It is imperative he stay. This exigency thrumming through him takes him by surprise. He lets it go hazy, lets his focus slip to something else.

To the way Newton unwinds his scarf to hang up, and the way his dark fan of lashes and hair are near-white with their own pelt of snow. They are both in the light, at last. Hermann reaches out, brushes the snow from Newton’s coat in silence. Newton’s hands, previously unwinding and unwinding as if unspooling yarn, still. He looks up at Hermann with his keen gaze, and Hermann glances back before he focuses on Newton’s coat.

“You were gone a while,” Hermann says at length. Newton’s coat is coarse, and the snow melts cold on Hermann’s hands. They ache. It aches.

“Sorry,” Newton says. “I got held up. Someone’s carriage broke down a ways up the road. I stopped with them to help.”

“You stopped with them to see if they would give you anything,” Hermann says.

“Who, me? Never.” Newton laughs quietly. He continues to unwind his scarf and slips out from under Hermann’s hands to hang it on a brass hook. He takes off his coat, and vest, and gloves.

Hermann pulls out two glasses from the cabinets and a tumbler of their finest—pours two fingers in each. He sloshes a bit, blames it on the cold and on his hands rather than the words that come unanticipated.

“Did you miss me?” Newton asks, in that way of his that is joke but is not joke. Hermann hands him a glass and sits in one of the chairs in front of the fire. Newton sits sprawled gracelessly in the other, elbow so close it grazes Hermann’s. He looks at Hermann from under heavy lids, lips stretched into a tired smile against the rim of the glass.

“I did,” Hermann says. He downs the glass. It’s heat, and warmth, and it spreads from his throat to his ribs and outward. He looks at the fire, not at the man.

Newton presses closer, reaches a hand over to rest it on Hermann’s. “I missed you too.”

Hermann jumps, swallows reflexively and knows there is a biconditional taut between them as there always is. Two if-then situations on a hair trigger.

“Oh dear,” he says. “You _are_ cold.”

It’s the truth—Newton is cold. His hands are veritably freezing. It overrides whatever ascetic modus operandi. Hermann gestures for his other one and he holds them both in one hand as he rubs them down between the other. “Do your gloves not work? We must buy you new ones.”

“That’s nice, Hermann,” Newton says, watching Hermann’s hands work over his own. He allows it for a bit and then he begins shifting in what Hermann assumes is restless energy—the kind that is not uncommon to him. But then Newton slides his hand across the top of his other hand until they both lay side by side between Hermann’s palms. He rubs his thumbs over Hermann’s hands, his fingers twitch, slowly close until he is clasping Hermann’s hand. He whets his lips, looks at Hermann and down at his mouth.

“I’m not cold anymore, Hermann,” he murmurs, prelude to a firm squeeze.

“So you aren’t.” Hermann moves to withdraw his hands but Newton holds him unrelenting.

“I’m not cold anymore, _Her-mann,_ but it feels nice.” Newton’s thumbs are still rubbing small circles into Hermann’s fleshy palms. “This is very good.”

Hermann hesitates, and then continues petting Newton’s hands—cannot help but think it so terribly close. Cannot help but think this near oneiric. Newton cannot possibly be here. He is out in the snow, frozen and hard and stuck to the road like an omen or a cursed herald of sorts. Newton cannot be here, leaning body into Hermann as they converge in the light. The essential ontological truth that Hermann’s slotted so neatly, so perfectly, so impeccably into its corresponding nodule is that Newton is not _this_. He is not tangible. He traverses the plane on several bifurcating lines that will never be legible to Hermann. Hermann is composed of a set of ciphers that do not complement the operand of Newton.

Newton is analogous.

He doesn’t have to be, but he is. There is a level of untranslatability between them that Hermann does not know how to breach.

He quiets his mind. He touches and is touched in return.

“You cannot know how often I’ve thought—I’ve wondered… wanted to touch you,” Newton murmurs with a sleep-lazy mouth. Hermann looks at him, gaze snagging on the pink of his mouth, and the flush of his face from firelight. This, then, surely is a dream. And if it is a dream, there is not material implication. But it is _not_. Hermann does not dream lucidly, and even his mind would not be so cruel. His mind would not be so creative to make up the textures of Newton.

“Have you?” Hermann asks, careful, quiet, hands heavy on Newton’s.

“Yes,” Newton says. “I’ve thought of your hands, touching them, skimming my fingers over them and across their topology.” He does it as he speaks—slips fingertips across divots and wrinkles and creases. “And of your forearms, how the fine hairs gleam in the lowlight.” He turns Hermann’s forearm slowly, revealing the golden turn of the down on them. Hermann dares not breathe, or think, or speak even. They are made of such finite things, he and Newton. This is another: another thing with an inevitable ending and Hermann is making himself not race toward the culmination. He is trembling, and he is staying his hand.

“Do not make fun,” Hermann says, voice thin. If there is anything as precarious as this, he has not confronted it yet. Newton’s gaze shoots up, at that. His eyes, full and assessing, linger.

“I am not, truly,” Newton says. “I’ve desired these things very much.” The intensity of his gaze and the focus of it are immense. Hermann feels the weight of it travel, rest on his chest—the knowledge of that magnitude.

I’ve thought of your chest,” Newton continues, shifting further in his chair, leaning into Hermann’s space and carefully sliding his doctor’s hands upward. His fingers graze warm at Hermann’s inner elbow, up his bicep, fingertips just skimming the side of Hermann’s chest.

“What of it?” Hermann asks, with no small measure of self-consciousness. Newton tilts his head, expression languid and considering as he looks at Hermann’s chest.

“I like that it’s broad and that it houses your ribs, which house your heart, which houses your being.” Newton’s hands slide further, thumb over collarbone and then palm at the side of Hermann’s neck where he’s sure Newton can feel his heart made a thrush beating inside the hollow of his chest.

“There are arguments that the being does not belong to the heart,” Hermann says, but it is weak. Newton smiles indulgently, tilts Hermann’s chin and runs his thumb over his jawline. 

“Yes,” he says wryly. “I dare say there is. Not my point, though.”

“What was-“ Hermann stammers. “What was your point?”

“Is there anything you like about me, Hermann?” Newton asks, close and peculiar in the sharp relief of the fire. “Anything at all? Do you dislike me so utterly? Speak now and I will hold my tongue. My legs pain me, and I have walked very far. I have been thinking for a very long while.”

“As long as you were absent?”

“Longer, even,” Newton says with a small shake of the head. “I ask you again: is there anything at all?”

A biconditional—possible tautology. Hermann is silent for a very long time. Newton waits for a very long time. Any other might have taken silence for an answer, but Hermann is like this about the unexpected—a bit slow. There is… _everything_. Hermann could say everything, and he could say more. He could be specific, he could be general, he could be poetic. Ecstatic, instead of suppressed. But the mind is too esoteric, chaotic, full of words and whirling impulses all scabbed over from how many times he’s picked at them. He reaches for words and takes the ones that will come to him without an absolute unleashing of being. He wishes not for an unbecoming, but a temporary transmutation. Just enough for the implicit to become explicit.

“There is something,” Hermann admits timidly, closing his eyes, bracing himself. _I am giving this to you_ , he thinks. _Carry it carefully, for it breaks._

But there is no breaking. There is no straining or combusting. There is just Hermann and Newton, as they have always been, and Hermann opens his eyes again carefully. Newton smiles, slides his hands up the slope of Hermann’s neck to cup the back of his head, fingers against the sheared hair there.

“There is something,” Newton parrots back and leans in to seal the distance.

 


End file.
